Etan wrote on Thursday, April 17, 2003 at 3:47:44 AM:
>> 7. deprecating h1-h6 is a performance hit for web browsers.
> [...]
>> that's _considerably_ slower
> Well, how much slower is it?
I did a very unscientific little test with two mostly identical 138 KB
documents containing a great number of h1-h6 and a great number of
section+h equivalents (in six level groups, to match the h1-h6
functionality). h1-h6 were matched with simple selectors and section+h
were matched with child selectors.
I tested with Opera 7.1 (Win32) on a 233 MHz K6.
I did notice a significant performance difference in rendering the
documents. The h1-h6 document took approximately three seconds to
render, and the section+h document took approximately five seconds to
render. That's about 1.7 times as long.
(Your results will vary. I only tested with one computer and one
version of one browser.)
> Is it worth cluttering the language to cater to today's software?
While I would prefer leaving h1-h6 out, since the performance hit
isn't likely to be often noticable even today, h1-h6 might as well be
left in and deprecated. I think most people will choose to use
section+h instead.
However, after typing "section" a few too many times I'm open to the
idea of the element name being shortened.
--
John Lewis